Charging system in Pop up Slide In Questions

[Josh41]

Hi All,
Not an electrician here, and having some difficulty muddling my way through way too much information.
I a have slide in camper on my Nissan Frontier. It has an electric panel that can take 110 or 12V in. When only 12 volts come in, only the 12 volt stuff works (ok with that). When 110 comes in, both 120v plugs and 12v stuff works.
We are planning a 5 week trip this summer, and want to make sure we have power when we want it, mostly for fans and lights.

All we really need is lights, phone charger, and the roof fan.

Curious if I have enough power to run the furnace all night in winter?

Questions:

With a 7 pin connector, is the accessory wire enough to charge the battery each day while driving?
Does the truck have an isolator or do I need to install one to prevent draining starter battery?
Can my truck handle it (two batteries to charge)?
How much solar would I need to keep the battery charged if I went this route?
What Fantastic Fan or MaxxAir draws the lowest? (just want to keep air moving)
Thanks
Josh


Battery: New

 

[Deleted member 96197]

You've got a lot going on in that post. Many of your questions are ones I would ask you, and you'll only be able determine by looking at your set up, but here's a start.


90ah is a pretty good size battery, and should probably be able to run your "All we really need is lights, phone charger, and the roof fan." although this depends a bit on how much light you need and the draw on your fan.
Running a furnace in the winter is going to be a very high draw, and not likely to work on this system.


I can't tell you if you have an isolator, but if you don't, you should look in to getting one. Unless you are completely disconnecting your starter battery from your house battery when you turn the truck off, which if you are using the accessory wire on the 7 pin connector, depending how it is wired it might be cut off with the ignition, I wouldn't rely on this though.

I would run a dedicated wire from an isolator to the house battery, that way you will charge off your alternator while you engine is running, and it will auto disconnect for you when you shut down the engine. As for your solar requirements, you can assume roughly 6 amps per peak hour from a 100 watt panel with about 5 peak hours per day, so with a 90+ ah battery, you would need about 3 - 100 watt panels to charge 100%, although if you are doing a good portion of your charging from the alternator (though the isolator) then a 100 watt panel will probably be good to keep you topped off.


Here's the isolator I'm using
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B...-3be4-5d05-80d7-ff35404c1fb1&pf_rd_i=15707061

 

[wirenut]

Likely that truck doesn't have a factory isolator. I'd install an Automatic Charge Relay (ARC) like one from Blue Sea. This will allow your truck to charge your battery or your solar to keep your truck battery topped up. If neither charge source is available it will isolate the batteries.
I don't think your stock alternator will have in trouble as far as capacity.
1 "standard" 100 Ah group 27 RV battery will likely only run the furnace for one night and not much else. The furnace fan draws a lot of power.
I would use 100 watts of solar as a minimum. Remember, the larger the solar panel the less expensive on a watts / dollar basis.

 

[rayra]

No on the accessory wire in the 7-pin. Those are usually 14ga or less, only good for about 15A and usually fused at that level. It would be enough to keep a charged 'house' battery topped off while driving around, but nowhere near enough to make good the losses from running any significant loads (like a heater all night).

As mentioned above, you'd do best to have a dedicated heavy-gauge wire and a solenoid-type connection to charge your house battery while your vehicle is running and disconnect / isolate your starting battery when it is not. This can be done for well under $100.

Josh you should read up on Amps and Amp-hours, and start determining the actual power consumption of your devices to get a better grasp of how long you can sustain that load without damaging your house battery, based on drive or idle time or with shore power or with solar panels. Speakign of 'shore power', is your slide in equipped to charge your house battery when it is plugged into 110? if not I'd go right after that as well. If your 110 stuff doesn't work when you aren't plugged in, then it doubt it does. If you properly install / integrate a solar charge controller / inverter into the wiring setup on your slide-in, it could serve all your power conversion needs.

 

[CaliMobber]

I dont have much time to rely to this so ill just add.

Make sure you have switched over all your lights to LED's, they use a fraction of the power conventional ones do. Also I agree a dedicated wire from the battery using the blue sea auto disconnect would be the best option for keeping your battery charged back up after a night with the heater on. A good amount of solar will help when not driving. I have 200w on my trailer and it does good when the suns high.

Check out Handybob https://handybobsolar.wordpress.com/ for good info on solar in campers/trailers.

 

[jonyjoe101]

a fantastic fan draws about 3 amps at the high setting, but it has 3 settings, at lower settings it uses a little over 1 amp. Sometimes you only need the low setting to move air.

LED lighting will work the best, I use the supernight leds, it comes in a roll of 10 feet, I only use 4 feet in my van, lights it pretty good for 2 amps. (you can adjust the output with a dimmer to use even less power). cost for a roll is 10 dollars.

As far as solar, I recommend go with the largest panel that fits on your roof. I have a 240 watt panel on the roof of my small astrovan. With my ecoworthy mppt, i get up to 12 amps of charge power. Even in cloudy weather I get usable power, where a smaller panel gives you nothing. In 3 years thats all I rely on to charge my house battery and I run fans/swampcooler/lights/inverters/netbook and occasionally my 11 amp roadpro cooker. Its better to have too much power than not enough, if I had the room I would stick another 240 watt panel on my roof. I got my 240 watt panel off craiglist for 200 dollars, it was a good deal. Before I had a smaller 120 watt panel, I paid 160 for it (about 6 amps of power).